BuzzFeed, Inc.

Good day, and welcome to BuzzFeed's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Vice President of Communications, Juliana Clifton.

Please go ahead. Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuzzFeed, Inc.' 's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. I'm Juliana Clifton, VP of Communications for BuzzFeed, and joining me today are CEO Jonah Peretti and CFO Matt Omer. Before we begin, please note that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. Risks and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are described in our Q1 2025 earnings release and in our filings with the SEC. including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our Q1 2025 quarterly report on Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margins. The use of non-GAAP financial measures allows us to measure the operational strength and performance of our business, to establish budgets, and to develop operational goals for managing our business. We believe adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin are relevant and useful information for investors because they allow investors to view performance in a manner similar to the method used by our management. A reconciliation of these GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release which is available now on our investor relations website. Now I'll turn the call over to Jonah.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. We're pleased to kick off 2025 on strong footing, operationally, financially, and strategically. In Q1, we made continued progress executing on our dual focus, running a leaner, more profitable core publishing business while investing in transformative new applications powered by generative AI. Our publishing business benefits from strong, trusted brands, BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Tasty. These brands are led by creative teams who are skilled at curating the internet, covering the most important stories, and developing creative content ideas. They have access to the best publishing tools, including new AI tools that have allowed us to increase editorial output 17% this quarter, And a new tool used for some stories has increased article performance by an average of 25%. This is possible because AI assistance allows us to combine the best of both worlds, human taste with AI insights. On the monetization side, our Lighthouse platform continues to improve with AI-powered ad targeting that actually understands our content, driving more contextually relevant placements for brands. We are less dependent on platforms than ever, with 62% of U.S. traffic to BuzzFeed.com coming from direct visits, internal referrals, and app usage. All of these developments have been hard won by our team, and it is gratifying to be in a much stronger position after several years of transformative work. We are excited to continue these efforts to achieve our goal of driving profitable growth at our maturing publishing businesses. We are also looking forward to the future as AI models open the possibility of totally new businesses. As we make progress on developing BF Island, our new AI native social media app, we've been testing more AI powered user generated formats on BuzzFeed site. Our users have been very eager to create using these new formats. Users who make AI creation on BuzzFeed spend over 20 times longer on our platform than casual Facebook referred users. Users who create and share their AI content spend 40 times longer on our platform than casual Facebook-referred users. AI creations are shared seven times more than all other content types on our platform. We are seeing new users' behaviors emerge as our audience learns to create and play with AI-powered formats. We will accelerate the development of these formats and push them even further with the launch of BF Island. Based on what we are already seeing on BuzzFeed, We believe there's a huge opportunity to drive significant growth and engagement and time spent on BFI Island, transforming the depth of connection we have with our audience. We are making progress on development and can't wait to share more with you later this year.